Karl Jaspers - Reason And Existence
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Karl Jaspers
First published Mon Jun 5, 2006; substantive revision Tue Jul 17, 2018
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) began his academic career working as a psychiatrist and, after a period of transition, he converted to philosophy in the early 1920s. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century he exercised considerable influence on a number of areas of philosophical inquiry: especially on epistemology, the philosophy of religion, and political theory.
The influence of Kant over Jaspers is widely acknowledged in the literature, to the extent that he has been depicted as “The first and the last Kantian” (Heinrich Barth, quoted in Ehrlich 1975, 211). Usually this evaluation is based on his reliance on the subjective-experiential transformation of Kantian philosophy, which reconstructs Kantian transcendentalism as a doctrine of particular experience and spontaneous freedom, and emphasizes the constitutive importance of lived existence for authentic knowledge. However, current commentators of his philosophy have started questioning this view. Jaspers obtained his widest influence, not through his philosophy, but through his writings on governmental conditions in Germany, and after the collapse of National Socialist regime he emerged as a powerful spokesperson for moral-democratic education and reorientation in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Despite his importance in the evolution of both philosophy and political theory in twentieth-century Germany, today Jaspers is to a large extent a neglected thinker. The explanations that are given for this are various. In the first place, it is argued that he did not found a particular philosophical school. For him, philosophy is a way of thought, which uses expert knowledge while going beyond it. He believed that by means of devoting oneself to philosophy, individuals do not cognize objects but explicate and actualize their being as thinkers and thus become themselves. Consequently, he did not attract a cohort of apostles, and, outside Germany at least, his works are not often the subject of high philosophical discussion. This is partly the result of the fact that the philosophers who now enjoy undisputed dominance in modern German philosophical history, especially Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno, wrote disparagingly about Jaspers, and they were often unwilling to take his work entirely seriously. Another explanation for Jaspers’s relative marginality relates to problematic nature of the English translations of his writings that render his thinking rather incommunicable to readers from English speaking countries. To be sure, he was extremely fortunate with his many translators, the most prominent of whom are Ralph Manheim and E.B. Ashton. But the translations often use misleading expression, choose different words to express the very same word in the original German, and thus confuse the readers. Also, unindicated omissions and other problems that result from favouring aesthetic considerations over accuracy all contribute to falsifying the original. It has been argued that Jaspers could not appeal to the English-speaking philosophical mind due to being too speculative and metaphysical or simply beyond the reach of the Anglo-American cultural horizons. To all these factors, one might add the fact of Jaspers’s association with the more prosaic periods of German political life, and of his name being tarred with an aura of staid bourgeois common sense. Nonetheless, Jaspers’s work set the parameters for a number of different philosophical debates, the consequences of which remain deeply influential in contemporary philosophy, and in recent years there have been signs that a more favourable reconstructive approach to his work is beginning to prevail.
First published Mon Jun 5, 2006; substantive revision Tue Jul 17, 2018
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) began his academic career working as a psychiatrist and, after a period of transition, he converted to philosophy in the early 1920s. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century he exercised considerable influence on a number of areas of philosophical inquiry: especially on epistemology, the philosophy of religion, and political theory.
The influence of Kant over Jaspers is widely acknowledged in the literature, to the extent that he has been depicted as “The first and the last Kantian” (Heinrich Barth, quoted in Ehrlich 1975, 211). Usually this evaluation is based on his reliance on the subjective-experiential transformation of Kantian philosophy, which reconstructs Kantian transcendentalism as a doctrine of particular experience and spontaneous freedom, and emphasizes the constitutive importance of lived existence for authentic knowledge. However, current commentators of his philosophy have started questioning this view. Jaspers obtained his widest influence, not through his philosophy, but through his writings on governmental conditions in Germany, and after the collapse of National Socialist regime he emerged as a powerful spokesperson for moral-democratic education and reorientation in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Despite his importance in the evolution of both philosophy and political theory in twentieth-century Germany, today Jaspers is to a large extent a neglected thinker. The explanations that are given for this are various. In the first place, it is argued that he did not found a particular philosophical school. For him, philosophy is a way of thought, which uses expert knowledge while going beyond it. He believed that by means of devoting oneself to philosophy, individuals do not cognize objects but explicate and actualize their being as thinkers and thus become themselves. Consequently, he did not attract a cohort of apostles, and, outside Germany at least, his works are not often the subject of high philosophical discussion. This is partly the result of the fact that the philosophers who now enjoy undisputed dominance in modern German philosophical history, especially Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno, wrote disparagingly about Jaspers, and they were often unwilling to take his work entirely seriously. Another explanation for Jaspers’s relative marginality relates to problematic nature of the English translations of his writings that render his thinking rather incommunicable to readers from English speaking countries. To be sure, he was extremely fortunate with his many translators, the most prominent of whom are Ralph Manheim and E.B. Ashton. But the translations often use misleading expression, choose different words to express the very same word in the original German, and thus confuse the readers. Also, unindicated omissions and other problems that result from favouring aesthetic considerations over accuracy all contribute to falsifying the original. It has been argued that Jaspers could not appeal to the English-speaking philosophical mind due to being too speculative and metaphysical or simply beyond the reach of the Anglo-American cultural horizons. To all these factors, one might add the fact of Jaspers’s association with the more prosaic periods of German political life, and of his name being tarred with an aura of staid bourgeois common sense. Nonetheless, Jaspers’s work set the parameters for a number of different philosophical debates, the consequences of which remain deeply influential in contemporary philosophy, and in recent years there have been signs that a more favourable reconstructive approach to his work is beginning to prevail.